November 9, 2012

Microsoft’s Chief Research Officer Rick Rashid demonstrates a speech recognition breakthrough via machine translation that converts his spoken English words into computer-generated Chinese language. The breakthrough is patterned after deep neural networks and significantly reduces errors in spoken as well as written translation.

comments 8

Don’t know about you but I did not really hear or feel his Chinese voice.. voice to text is very important but as for the need for it to be my voice -…. I’m not sure that matters, an excellent translation is really the key.
About competition Microsoft has big dreams and that is great because so does Google and as it stands I think Google is winning this race.

I don’t care where the profits fall, this is HUGE! Anyone who’s spent much time in a foreign country frustrated over poor or non-existent communication, has dreamed of this day. I can’t believe this is the only positive comment.

You should care where profits fall. Historically, Microsoft use inordinate strong arm tactics to stifle competitive innovation that on the whole set technology back decades. So Microsoft subscribers merely continue to sow the seeds of their own frustration and this ‘breakthrough’ if anything will be mediocre rather than ‘huge’.

That could be, but it apparently wasn’t the case with Kinect, where Microsoft has made it easy for developers to create impressive uses, and I don’t know of any evidence (do you?) that better, cheaper ($70) Leap 3D (out early next year, pre-orders available) is being suppressed. http://www.kurzweilai.net/introducing-the-leap